John of the Cross
Spanish Carmelite friar who joined Teresa of Ávila’s reform as one of its first two friars in 1568. Imprisoned for nine months by friars of his own order in 1577–1578, he is the author of the poem and treatise The Dark Night.
Teresa of Ávila tells how she met him at Medina del Campo: a young Carmelite, still a student at Salamanca, who was thinking of leaving for the Carthusians. She persuaded him to wait and join the house of friars she hoped to found (Teresa, Foundations 3.16 (pp. 30–31)). He and an older friar, Antonio, were the first to enter it, and the first mass there was said in Advent 1568 (Teresa, Foundations 13.1–2 and 14.5 (pp. 105–106, 111)).
In December 1577 Teresa wrote to the king that friars of the unreformed observance had carried off the two confessors of the reform serving a convent at Ávila, and that she feared for the life of one of them (Teresa, Letters to Philip II, 4 December 1577 (vol. 3, pp. 3–5)). A letter of the following August names him and says that he had been held for nine months in a cell hardly large enough for him, and had escaped (Teresa, Letters to Father Gracián, August 1578 (vol. 3, pp. 147–148)).
His poem of the dark night, with his own prose commentary, describes the soul’s way to union with God through a purgation of the senses and then of the spirit (John of the Cross, Dark Night prologue; 1.8). See Teresa of Ávila Reforms Carmel.
In the timeline
- 24 August 1562, firm dateTeresa of Ávila Reforms Carmel
In 1562 the Carmelite nun Teresa founds the small, enclosed and unendowed convent of St Joseph at Ávila to keep her order’s rule in its early strictness. More houses follow, friars join the reform, among them John of the Cross, and both leave writings on prayer.